Let’s see how those predictions worked out with a guesstimate by guesstimate recap!

1. The Networks Settle In

In my top prediction for 2013, I said there would be no disruptive launch or trend that would impact the market position of the major social networks.

Vine and SnapChat reached 40 and 25 million, respectively, but both seemed to be a feature that the larger networks are incorporating. That being said, I did predict last week that Vine would become a major in 2014.

2. Content Marketing Fades Again

Toward the end of 2012, content marketing seemed to be the dominant trend in the sector. It remained hot through the first quarter and into the second quarter.

But then native advertising — still content, but a sponsored form of it — began to take headlines away from the content marketing boom. People began to complain about too much content, and other trends like marketing automation, Google Glass and contextual marketing began to take headlines.

Don’t get me wrong, content marketing is a critical business tactic and should continue to command attention. But without question, this trend became much more of a blue chip topic in 2013.

3. Samsung Mops Up Apple Market Share

As it turned out, Samsung remained flat on smartphone marketshare, but Apple did drop losing out to other Android manufacturers.

4. Clicks and Mortar

This trend predicted that consumer businesses would make great strides integrating their brick and mortar stores with their online properties.

While some progress was made — and the contextual marketing revolution that people are starting to talk about embodies clicks and mortar in many forms — overall, this trend prediction was off.

Perhaps 2014 will bring clicks and mortar to life, but we are seeing some tremendous IT issues preventing this from becoming a quick reality.

What Else Happened of Note in 2013?

It became apparent that social media marketing has its limits.

Specifically, more and more chatter came out about significant majorities of people never following brands on social networks. Conversations went private with instant messages and SnapChat. Facebook throttled back organic brand traffic in the stream. Finally, brands started to rely heavily on native advertising to force their way into social network streams.

It all added up to the inevitable reality check we had heretofore not seen in social media marketing.

Marketing automation was already mentioned, but two major transactions — an IPO (Marketo) and an acquisition (Pardot by Salesforce) — highlighted how important this kind of software is becoming for companies.

With a renewed focus on ease of use and training, expect to see marketing automation make further inroads in 2014 (one of my predictions from last week’s webinar).

Big data bombed. Not the actual use of it, but the marketing trend.

People just didn’t get it. The way big data was presented by Silicon Valley and the tech community perplexed marketers. Now when the talk shifted to improved segmentation and market analysis through data, people relaxed a little and embraced our new overload of data.

I’ll take three out of four on 2013 predictions. Let’s see where the 2014 predictions take us!